Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish Legions 21 Chapter 1 Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish Legions: Sephardic Legends’ Journey from Biblical Polemic to Humanist History Adam G. Beaver Hebrew Antiquities There was no love lost between the Enlightened antiquarians Francisco Martínez Marina (1754–1833) and Juan Francisco de Masdeu (1744–1817).1 Though both were clerics – Martínez Marina was a canon of St Isidore in Madrid, and Masdeu a Jesuit – and voracious epigraphers, their lives and careers diverged in profound ways. Masdeu was an outsider in his profession: expelled from the Iberian Peninsula along with his fellow Jesuits in 1767, he spent most of the last fifty years of his life in Rome. There, substituting the descriptions and sketches forwarded by sympathetic amanuenses in Spain for the ancient remains he would never see firsthand, he continued to pursue his research in Iberian antiquities in open opposition to the state-sanctioned proj- ects conceived and carried out by the prestigious Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid. Martínez, in contrast, was the consummate insider, inhabiting the very centers of power denied to Masdeu: a member of the liberal parliament of 1820–23, he was also an early member, and eventually two-time president, of the Real Academia which Masdeu scorned. It was almost certainly as a staunch defender of the Real Academia’s massive research projects – especially its offi- cial catalogue of ancient Iberian inscriptions, which Masdeu proposed to better with his own inventory – that Martínez Marina acquired his palpable distaste for Masdeu, his methods, and his ideological commitments. 1 On Martínez Marina and Masdeu, see Roberto Mantelli, The Political, Religious and Historiographical Ideas of J.F. Masdeu, S.J., 1744–1817 (New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1987); María Concepción Castrillo Llamas, ‘D. Francisco Martínez Marina: el hombre y su obra’, Medievalismo, 2 (1992): pp. 219–25; Enrique García Hernán, ‘Construcción de las historias de España en los siglos XVII y XVIII’, in La construcción de la Historia de España, (ed.) Ricardo García Cárcel (Madrid: Fundación Carolina, Centro de Estudios Hispánicos e Iberoamericanos, Marcial Pons, 2004), pp. 127–94. © Adam G. beaver, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004324329_003 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND License. Adam G. Beaver - 9789004324329 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:49:06AM via free access 22 Beaver Martínez Marina was especially skeptical of the orientalist dimension of Masdeu’s scholarship, and particularly of his handling of the ‘ancient’ Hebrew inscriptions which the Jesuit claimed could be found throughout the Peninsula – including, most famously, a pair of fragmentary tomb inscriptions unearthed in the late fifteenth century near the Jewish cemetery in the Aragonese town of Morvedre.2 While Martínez Marina was inclined to date the Morvedre inscrip- tions to the Middle Ages, Masdeu (who may have been in the majority) claimed to have proof that they were quite a bit older – indeed, that they dated back to the tenth century BCE and the reign of the biblical king Solomon, demonstra- ting that Iberia’s Jewish population was the oldest in the world outside of Palestine. For Martínez Marina, such claims were emblematic of Masdeu’s gul- libility; for Masdeu, Martínez Marina’s refusal to accept them smacked of snobbery. Their rivalry finally boiled over in 1799,when Martínez Marina published a scathing review of Masdeu’s Historia crítica de España (20 vols., 1783–1807)3 in the Real Academia’s annual Memorias.4 In the course of some 150 pages, Martínez Marina accused his exiled counterpart – as well as the Cordoban franciscans Pedro and Rafael Rodríguez Mohedano, co-authors of a popular Historia literaria de España (10 vols., 1769–91)5 – not only of misreading the Morvedre inscriptions, but also of willfully misinterpreting the Bible, falsifying material evidence, and corrupting the very moral fabric of Spanish history with ‘puerile stories and the crudest fables’ lifted from medieval Jewish propa- ganda.6 Masdeu and the Mohedanos, Martínez Marina fumed, had done more than try to pass off some medieval Hebrew inscriptions as proof that Solomon had established tributary settlements in the peninsula. Channeling ‘the ridicu- lous tales of fifteenth-century Spanish rabbis’ like Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1508), they had tried to make the whole of ancient Iberia into a Jewish colony, posi- ting that the city of Toledo itself – the spiritual capital of Spanish church and 2 On the Morvedre inscriptions, see Jordi Casanovas Miró, Real Academia de la Historia. Catálogo del Gabinete de Antigüedades. Epigrafía hebrea (Madrid: RAH, 2005), pp. 105–10; David Malkiel, ‘The Artifact and Humanism in Medieval Jewish Thought’, Jewish History, 27 (2013): pp. 21–40. 3 Juan Francisco de Masdeu, Historia crítica de España, y de la cultura española en todo género (Madrid: Antonio de Sancha, 1783–1807). 4 Francisco Martínez Marina, ‘Antigüedades hispano-hebreas, convencidas de supuestas y fabu- losas. Discurso histórico-crítico sobre la primera venida de los judíos a España’, Memorias de la Real Academia de la Historia, 3 (1799): pp. 317–468. 5 Rafael and Pedro Rodríguez Mohedano, Historia literaria de España, (Madrid: García, 1769–91). 6 Martínez Marina, ‘Antigüedades hispano-hebreas’, p. 384. Adam G. Beaver - 9789004324329 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:49:06AM via free access Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish Legions 23 nation – had been founded by the Jews whom the ancient king Nebuchadnezzar II (r. ca. 605–562 BCE) carried off from Jerusalem into the Babylonian Captivity (ca. 597–539 BCE) described in 2 Kings 24 and 2 Chronicles 36. If these Jewish fictions were to be believed, Nebuchadnezzar – or, in some versions, his ally or subordinate Pirrus – brought his Jewish captives not to the shores of the Tigris and Euphrates, but rather to the Pillars of Hercules, where he set them the task of subjugating ancient Iberia’s Phoenician colonies. Afterwards, the story went, the Jews were permitted to settle in the Iberian heartland, where they left behind traces of their habitation not only in the physical fabric of Toledot and its environs, but also in the alleged Hebraic roots of Spanish language and culture. To be fair to Masdeu and the Mohedanos, Martínez Marina was quick to note that they were only the latest in a very long line of Christian historians to per- petuate the legend of Iberia’s Israelite conquerors. The majority of his review, in fact, is dedicated to his exhaustive efforts to trace Nebuchadnezzar through Spanish historiography, beginning in his own time and ending when the trail ran cold during the reign of Felipe II (r. 1556–98). It was then, Martínez Marina announced, that a circle of érudits gathered around the famed orientalist Benito Arias Montano (1527–98) – a circle which included fray Luis de León as well as the historians Esteban de Garibay and Juan de Mariana – boldly transplanted the myth of Toledo’s Jewish foundations from Sephardic commentaries into mainstream humanist historiography.7 It was an improbable finding, to say the least. This moment, so deeply marked by Counter-Reformation, Inquisitorial censorship, and the obsession with limpieza de sangre, would not seem to be the likeliest place to find Christian scholars rummaging in medieval Hebrew sources in the hope of finding evidence of Spain’s Jewish origins.8 Indeed, within a generation of the Nebuchadnezzar legend’s first appearance in Christian historiography in the mid-sixteenth century, the Inquisition attem- pted a clean sweep of Spain’s Christian hebraists, prosecuting or otherwise 7 The first Christian author to treat Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest at length was Benito Arias Montano in his Commentaria in dvodecim prophetas (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1571), pp. 462–64; from there the subject was picked up by Luis de León, Esteban de Garibay, Juan de Mariana, as well as dozens of other authors through the seventeenth century. See Dominique Reyre, ‘Topónimos hebreos y memoria de la España judía en el Siglo de Oro’, El Criticón, 65 (1995): pp. 31–53; Andrés Moreno Mengíbar and Juan Martos Sánchez, ‘Mesianismo y Nuevo Mundo en fray Luis de León, In Abdiam Prophetam Expositio’, Bulletin Hispanique, 98 (1996): pp. 261–89; Francisco J. Perea Siller, ‘Benito Arias Montano y la identificación de Sefarad. Exégesis poligráfica de Abdías 20’, Helmántica, 51 (2000): pp. 199–218. 8 Lu Ann Homza, Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 77. Adam G. Beaver - 9789004324329 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:49:06AM via free access 24 Beaver cowing not only Luis de León and Arias Montano, but also Gaspar de Grajal, Alonso de Gudiel, Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, and Martín Martínez de Cantalapiedra in a clear demonstration of how easily philological interest in Sephardic materials could be construed as ‘judaizing’.9 Even so, it remained indisputable that between the second half of the sixte- enth century and Martínez Marina’s own day a wide array of Christian scholars – some of them hebraists like Arias Montano, but many more of them exclu- sively Latinate or Castilian authors like the historian Garibay and even the dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca – decided to graft a story about the ancient Israelites from the Sephardic commentary tradition onto the narrowing trunk of foundation myths deployed by the Hispanic Monarchy.10 This seemed to call for an explanation, but Martínez Marina – who, like most eighteenth-century